


Care Packages

by onereyofstarlight



Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Family, Gen, Grief, Happy Ending, Hope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:34:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24125980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onereyofstarlight/pseuds/onereyofstarlight
Summary: After Jeff disappeared, John found his own way to cope. His method turned out to be more important that he could have dreamt possible.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 27





	Care Packages

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gumnut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gumnut/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Thunderbird X](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22751959) by [Gumnut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gumnut/pseuds/Gumnut). 



> inspired by [Gumnut's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gumnut/pseuds/Gumnut) [ Thunderbird X](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22751959) which is still such a wonderful wonderful fic.

“He’s gone,” yells Gordon and John flinches back, his words striking a blow across twenty-two and a half thousand miles of space.

Gordon’s words aren’t meant for him, he’s screaming at Scott and John’s meant to be mediating, meant to help stand up for one and protect the other, but he’s struggling to hold onto reality in the wake of his father’s disappearance.

_Death_ , he reminds himself.

He mutes the feed, unable to listen to his brothers fighting anymore, and pushes back from the holoprojector so that neither can see the way the tears are falling from his face as he watches his family break apart.

A quiet beep catches his attention and he pulls up the call.

“Are you okay?”

It’s Virgil. John wonders how he could possibly know, but then Virgil always seemed able to read John’s emotions better than he himself could.

He speaks quietly, sitting in the dim light of Alan’s bedroom and clasping their baby brother’s hand in his as he sleeps.

When John was Alan’s age, he had both his parents.

Virgil looks older, haggard and grave in a way that doesn’t suit the face of a young adult. It makes John feel impossibly young beside him.

“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” he whispers. “He can’t be alive and he also can’t be gone.”

There’s a loud crash and Virgil winces at the sound.

“I should be saying something to them.”

“No, I’ll go,” says Virgil. “Stay on the line in case Alan wakes.”

He stays, watching the rise and fall of his brother’s chest. He doesn’t know what Virgil says to his brothers but he returns later, his normally calm face stormy.

He doesn’t ask.

The next morning John receives a call from Scott.

“Am I deluding myself? Is Gordon right?”

He hates himself for refusing to squash the desperate hope that is glinting madly in Scott’s eyes. He hates himself more for not wanting to face the cold, objective truth that his Dad was gone. He’s always prided himself on his ability to calmly accept the facts that were and not the ones he wished could be. Now though, John has run out of faith in science, his foolish insistence that the universe could be catalogued into a semblance of order has been overturned by the chaos of an explosion over the Pacific Ocean. His head and heart can no longer agree on reality and John is disorientated by the endless questions that pierce him from the planet below.

“Do you think there’s any hope?”

John doesn’t know what he believes anymore, is tongue-tied in the realm of uncertainty.

“There’s always hope.”

And he finds deep down he believes in his own words. He reaches out to record a message, one to throw away, hoping that this awful, indefinite desperation might be flung out into space along with it if he lets it go far enough.

A high band frequency, a carefully chosen timeslot when he’s certain his message won’t interfere with – or be intercepted by – the radio telescopes on the Earth below, and his own trembling voice on loop.

“Calling Zero-X from Thunderbird Five, Colonel Jeff Tracy, do you copy?”

He stifles a sob in his throat.

“Please respond.”

Alone in space, his final message, his final hope, left Thunderbird Five with as powerful a signal as John could configure. He makes a programme to send his message out to the stars, embeds it into Five’s core so it can repeat whenever the conditions are right, a lonely cry for his father to come home.

Ten months later, Scott calls him down from Thunderbird Five and for the first time they discuss the future and not the past. The subroutine is lost, buried deep within Five and John chooses to forget the constant radio fluctuations that propagate into deep space from his home.

***

EOS stretches out and explores her new home often. John is yet to get tired of her insistent questions and he loves that she prefers to ask him instead of searching for the information on her own. The inefficient quirk only serves to tell John how much she trusts him.

He can’t deny the way his heart leaps whenever he’s given the opportunity to teach her about something new, even if he sometimes struggles to put the abstract concepts of emotion into terms she can understand.

“John, why do you continue to transmit to your father after he is gone?”

John frowns. He speaks often to his mother and father as he stares out into the stars and he’s already discussed this with EOS, pushing through the exhaustion and the tears as he explained what it meant to miss someone, what it meant to grieve.

Today, he’s too tired to explain all over again.

“We’ve talked about this before.”

“No,” she insists. Before he can reply, his own voice fills the station, wet and rubbed raw in a way that shoots straight into his heart.

John freezes. Sometimes EOS doesn’t realise what her innocent questions do, the way they can send a spike of adrenaline shooting through his body and engage the section of his brain which wants to run and hide from a reality he’s given up on. He’s back in that moment of desperation five years ago, the recording made in a haze of grief and endless hope that he’d never really relinquished.

He opens his mouth to speak, but instead he sobs, synchronised with the artificial sound of his own voice.

He sounds young.

The recording dies away as EOS observes him and that only makes him cry harder, to see her small developments in emotional sensitivity. He taught her that, the same way his Mom and Dad taught him and he can see the aspects of his life that his Dad doesn’t know, will never know stretching out in front of him.

“I’m sorry, John,” says EOS. “I did not mean to cause you distress.”

“You didn’t know,” he gasps. “I had forgotten about it.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Yes.”

And he does. She already knows the facts, less than half a second has returned more results than any of them could wish for about his death, but he can give her something more.

She’s silent and turns the new data over as she examines it’s effect.

“I do not understand. Your father is dead. You knew this when you made the recording. You know this now. Your actions are illogical.”

There’s an ache in his chest but it has kindled something greater in his heart.

“Sometimes EOS, things happen that we don’t understand, that we can’t understand. We can accept the reality given or we can search for an alternative.”

“You delude yourselves to make your feelings less significant and have less impact on your life.”

“No, EOS,” said John with a tired smile. “We hope.”

She doesn’t understand yet, he can see that. He doesn’t fully understand it either.

Later that night, he lies in bed and allows his fingers to pull apart the code embedded in Thunderbird Five. He stares at the small subroutine, still running perfectly after all these years.

He has a choice to make, he knows that. It’s a choice they’ve all faced at one point or another – whether or not to keep searching. He glances over at the digital frame, cycling through the familiar sight of his family. His breath catches as he sees the photos he’d added to the collection only a few short weeks ago, of Gordon pushing both Scott and Virgil into the pool only to be shoved in turn by Kayo on the next image. He wishes his Dad could see where they all were now, wishes there was someway to let him know they were okay. He searches for the star that he’d chosen as a representative of his father, but the seasons are wrong and it is lost behind the glare of the Sun.

His hand hovers over the programme he’d built to outlast his grief, hesitating as he considers shutting it down. He doesn’t know why it is so hard, to sever the last remaining link of a delusion. But he needs to talk to his father, wants it so badly he might be sick. He’s not ready to let go and so instead, he encrypts a single photo and adds it to the message.

***

He updates and replaces the addition to his message regularly. It’s become a habit, an addiction to the idea that even if his Dad is gone that there might still be a way to communicate with him. It’s illogical, but EOS says nothing when he sits down every month or so to share the events of his life with his dead father.

He doesn’t add much to the message, conscious of the need for privacy in case his cries are ever intercepted, acutely aware of the fact that not once has he mentioned to his family what he is broadcasting into space.

He just can’t seem to stop.

He sends a copy of Gordon’s speech at his graduation the previous year from the boarding school he’d attended.

Virgil’s landscape series of paintings.

A photo of Scott scowling as Gordon crashed in on him getting ready for a date.

“Alan can drive now,” he tells him with a shocked laugh. “I trust him in a plane, but the thought of Alan in a car is terrifying, he has no concept of speed limits.”

If his Dad has to remain absent for the rest of their lives, John can’t imagine a place he’d rather find him than amongst the stars. It had been his Dad who had taught him the constellations, how to navigate, how to survive in the emptiness. He’d loved his universe too deeply for the inky black to scare him. He never liked to be alone out there though, the solitude grating in a way it wasn’t for John, and so the updates continue. He doesn’t want his father to feel alone.

A scientific paper, with Gordon’s name written on it, describing the new taxonomy of Europaanian life.

Shyly, he adds a photo of himself and Ridley to the message a few months later. Even if he doesn’t want to talk about it with the rest of his family, not yet, he can tell someone about how nervous he feels about letting someone new into his life. His Dad had always understood that about him.

It’s on his enforced downtime when the music begins to float as gently through the space station as John did. He smiles, recognising the melody of one of Virgil’s favourite pieces.

It had been one of the first modifications he’d made to Thunderbird Five, one of many of which his brothers were unaware. An automatic audio uplink, a connection between Five and their mother’s piano, that relayed the music his brother chose to perform for himself. It provided a tangible link, not just to Tracy Island, but to Virgil himself. He knew from the music whether or not his brother needed a listening ear.

Right now, the music is soft and at peace and John is glad to hear it. With the recent introduction of the Chaos Crew in their lives, his brother deserves whatever peace he can find.

“EOS, make a recording,” he calls softly. He floats serenely above his beloved Earth, the feeling of contentment spreading warm from his chest.

“Wish you could hear this Dad,” he whispers as he updates his message that he’s sent to the stars.

He can see the binary system of Spica in the distance, the star his father had pointed to all those years ago and gently told him that his mother was watching over him from there. He hadn’t known at the time that the one star was really two, and he can’t think of a place his Dad would rather be than with his Mom.

It’s the last time he updates his father for a long while, the work of International Rescue taking over their lives as they struggle to adapt to the disregard for human life the Chaos Crew presents. It’s as discouraging to see as it is exhausting, and John doesn’t have the time or the energy to entertain a fantasy that’s now old enough to be in elementary school.

“Cranial contusion, concussion, vertebral compression fractures, compound radial fracture, spiral femoral fracture, and a shattered patella.”

John reads the list aloud as clinically as he can manage given the image of his younger brother is floating in front of his vision as he speaks. He takes a deep, shuddering breath trying desperately to compose himself for the next words he will speak.

“Dad, we know you’re out there somewhere. We miss you. Please know we won’t stop looking and we will find you.”

He updates the looped message for one final time. In three weeks, Scott will have had enough time to realise his brother’s home doubles as the most powerful communication satellite in the Solar System, and that now they have a target to aim for.

He shuts down the programme.

***

He doesn’t stop speaking to his father. He is no longer is speaking to a dead man to update him on the lives of his children once a month, but instead trying to co-ordinate the relentless demands of a family, desperate to reach out to a living father, son, friend, loved one.

It’s changed every facet of their lives.

“Hey, are you transmitting right now John? Hey Dad! We’re all out here saving the world! Except Johnny of course. He’s busy bossing us around. Imagine if he’d been born first instead of Scott, he’d be insufferable.”

“I’m not sending him that,” scowls John. He can see the way Gordon pouts on the holoscreen, can read the disappointment behind the levity. He sends the file.

Alan doesn’t want to make a recording, wants to speak to his father himself, but he settles for ‘leaving a voicemail’ from Thunderbird Five. He insists on flying up to John, collapsing in his brother’s arms and confiding his anxieties before making his call.

“What if he doesn’t like me?” he whispers, and John’s heart breaks.

“He loved you then, he loves you now, and he will love you again,” John murmured into his baby brother’s hair. “Go on sprout, tell him what’s been happening.”

Alan sends him his latest report card, a photo of him and Bran, and the leaderboards for his favourite video games. He tells his father about how they work and why he likes them and how much he loves working for International Rescue. His father won’t see the way Alan’s eyes light up when he speaks of his legacy but John does and he has to hold back tears as he watches his brother, so kind and enthusiastic and growing up fast. He has to hold back his tears a lot these days.

Gordon’s been smiling ever since they found out for sure, his face threatening to crack under the strain. He sends an updated list of dad jokes to “make sure you’re prepared for when you next see us” and also a photo of him standing on the Olympic podium. There’s a scan of a notebook that John’s never seen before, containing signatures of every kid Gordon’s ever rescued.

He only sends one audio file, a whispered apology for giving up that John knows his father has already forgiven.

Virgil sends music. He records every one of his Dad’s old favourites and tells John to blast them into space. He also sends hours of one sided conversations, not trusting his written words to reach across the billions of miles. John doesn’t listen to them, knowing how Virgil has needed this release, full of pent up emotions and years of biting his tongue and chasing after Scott.

Scott has made it his life mission to bring their father home and as soon as he understands the implications of being able to send a message _back_ , he changes. He doesn’t want the responsibility of his siblings bearing down on him now that it doesn’t have to be that way forever and he makes the shift from commander to number one before they even have a viable way to get to him. It doesn’t matter. Scott won’t trust himself to emotion, not after eight long years of weary pain, and he sends only mission reports and status updates. John’s not sure if Scott’s struggling to keep his hope alive after all these years, or if his life has really become so consumed by his work without any of them noticing.

He sends his own apology to his father after that.

And then one day, Brains makes the call.

_A matter of days,_ John repeats to himself again and again, as he struggles to keep his mind on the rescue at hand. His brothers are scrambling into their gear and he knows he only has a few precious minutes. “EOS, take over for a sec,” he said. “Call me as soon as they’re in the air.” “FAB John.” He hit the ground running as the gravity ring began to spin. “Dad,” he said, his voice breathless as he began the final recording that he would send into the far reaches of the solar system. “Dad, I don’t know if you can hear us. But if you get this, you need to know. We’re _coming_. We’re on our way to you _right now_. When you listen to this message, we’ll be there. We’ll be there. This is Thunderbird Five, signing off.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! If you haven't already, DEF check out Gumnut's [fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22751959) because wow show her some love, it's epic :D
> 
> Cross posted from Tumblr, orginal date was 17/02/2020


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